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tual beings who are the most common agents of misfortune. Although the jao cause misfortune, they enable the Atuot to "see" the true consequences of human actions through their possession of diviners. |
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In Madagascar it is the ancestors who guide human action through divination, as Vérin and Rajaonarimanana show in their discussion of the development and diffusion of divination by Antemoro diviners. Diviners mediate between the living and the ancestors as they reveal each individual's vintana, or "destiny." The multifaceted integration by the Antemoro of Arabic astrology and the indigenous system based on lunar months is evident in the diviner's ancient guides in Arabico-Malagasy script, which incorporate astrological information, sikidy figures, and traditional medicinal preparations (see Sussman and Sussman 1977; Bloch 1968; Mack 1986). This process is similar to that of the Ethiopian awdunigist diviner, who also uses synoptic texts to guide his numerological diagnoses (Young 1977). |
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Vérin and Rajaonarimanana's use of archival materials as well as ethnographic data gives a diachronic perspective on the existing epistemology's adaptation of the Arabic system. For years Islamic divination practices were assumed to be the source of sub-Saharan African traditions. Certainly there has been Arabic influence in East Africa, as Whyte and Parkin note (see their essays in this volume), and in Nigeria (see Bascom 1969; Boston 1974; Nadel 1970); but in Madagascar, as elsewhere, Arabic systems probably were either appended to indigenous systems or absorbed in a syncretic process by the diviners to augment their divinatory repertoires. |
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Future research on African systems of divination will benefit greatly from historical and comparative approaches, especially in regionally based studies. The recording of African peoples' histories will rely more and more on the indigenous texts generated by divination sessions. In the search for knowledge, divination illuminates individual client histories as well as maintaining and adjusting group traditions. Therefore, such texts both contain and comment directly on a culture's historical record. |
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See reference list at end of main introduction. |
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